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Jaguar Land Rover is right on Brexit. But cars can’t save Birmingham

Guardian Web |
Friday, 14 September 2018 10:21 (EST)

To come from the West Midlands and say you don’t like cars is tantamount to heresy, yet it’s precisely because I come from the West Midlands that I can’t stand the things. Nevertheless, it produced intensely mixed feelings to hear the car manufacturing giant Jaguar Land Rover – which directly and indirectly employs tens of thousands in the region – state that it can’t guarantee any of its UK jobs in the event of a hard Brexit.

JLR, which employs tens of thousands of people at its plants in Castle Bromwich, Solihull, Gaydon (near Coventry) and south Staffordshire, has dominated much of my experience and perception of Birmingham since growing up there in the 1980s. Boys at school wanted to work at “the Rover”, as jobs there were well paid and skilled. As the Lode Lane plant, a few miles from my parents’ house, grew, it seemed to become a town in itself: knowing it was there, giving people decent work, felt like a bulwark against decades of manufacturing destruction and wage attrition in the region.

When the vast MG Rover plant at Longbridge finally closed in 2005, with the direct loss of 6,300 jobs, more than 500 workers were out of work and had not received any retraining almost a year later. Three years after closure, research by Birmingham Business School found most former MG workers had seen their annual pay drop by almost £6,000.

And yet. I can’t stand cars, though it’s not cars themselves that are the problem – or, in the main, the people who drive them – but what the late sociologist John Urry called “the system of automobility”: the roads, the speed, the insane inefficiency of producing one giant, dangerous, complex, environmentally disastrous mobility machine for every adult who can afford one.

In capitulating to the car system in the 1950s and 1960s, Birmingham’s leaders, most notably its chief planner, Herbert Manzoni, tried to be the first to create a 21st-century city based on technology developed in the late 19th century. Cars are archaic, even if the methods used to produce them are increasingly high-tech.

There has to be a better way. In 1976, threatened workers at Lucas Aerospace in Birmingham developed a detailed and visionary plan to save their jobs by proposing that the company transitioned from making products for military use to making socially useful products such as medical equipment, collective transport and energy conservation tools. Tellingly, the Lucas workers involved in the plan were opposed not only by the company’s managers, who refused even to present the proposals to the government – its biggest customer and its greatest potential investors – but by union leaders whose focus was on retaining jobs in the present rather than saving them for the future.

There are echoes of this in the present day, as the Unite leader, Len McCluskey, comes out in favour of a third runway at Heathrow rather than demanding investment in more sustainable forms of travel – and, by definition, more sustainable jobs for his members.

While individual car ownership appears to have peaked, the total number of car journeys made annually has risen since the financial crash of 2008, caused in part by more pressurised lives, longer and more frequent commutes to work, and repeated cuts to bus services. People living on the peripheries of cities and in rural areas, though poorer and on average older, are increasingly forced towards car ownership and frequent taxi use.

None of this is of direct concern to JLR’s bosses and its owner, Tata, whose primary concern is on maintaining high levels of export sales for its Liverpool-made Evoque model – a sort of mini-SUV for urban use, as though anyone actually needs a mini-SUV for urban use – and the Land Rover Discovery, made in Solihull – though production is to move to Slovakia – for sale mainly in China and America. Imagine if JLR were encouraged to make the same investment in high-quality, non-polluting, cheap-to-run buses, trams and trains.

In the spirit of the Lucas Plan, the abundant skills of Birmingham car workers can’t be lost in the event of a catastrophe-level Brexit. It’s obvious now, in a time of political and social upheaval and environmental danger, that government has to play a direct role in encouraging companies to think about the products they produce – the effects they have, how they can be used to help save the world rather than destroy it – and to actively recruit their workers to do that thinking.

This is not, in any way, to welcome JLR’s statement or to suggest that Brexit – as it seems to be heading – is a great idea that will automatically lead to companies making radical decisions that will benefit anyone other than their shareholders. JLR is simply trying to point out the obvious: that British manufacturing has been aggressively directed towards frictionless trade and supply, and that any degree of friction may cause the whole enterprise to seize up.

But we shouldn’t be celebrating the fact that the Midlands’ main source of skilled manufacturing jobs, at least for now, is making cars. Another Birmingham is possible.

• Lynsey Hanley is a freelance writer and the author of Estates: an Intimate History and Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide

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